Hukkster Returns, This Time as a Daily Deals Site

It was a sad day for online sales shoppers when Hukkster, a site that enabled users to track price drops on clothing and other products, announced that it was shutting down. But on Thursday morning, its domain name rose from the dead as a new site, with new management and a new mission.

The new Hukkster, which is run by the e-commerce business ERetail Media, is all about saving shoppers money today rather than in the future, says Todd Foot, the site's content manager. That means surfacing popular sale items from various e-commerce sites, and offering up coupons on top of that. The plan is to post about 100 new deals each day, Foot says, the legwork of which is not automated, but instead largely carried out by a 10-person team of deal hunters. ("We don't want to bombard them. We want to give them the best items," Foot explains.) And though Hukkster 2.0 will initially be focused on fashion and beauty products, the plan is to expand into other product categories.

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How did this changing of the guard happen? When Hukkster filed for bankruptcy last year, it put a bunch of assets up for sale, including the copyright for its iOS app, its Python Django code base, its various domain names, its app users, its 300,000-person customer database and its trademarks (Hukkster and "Hukk"). In December, the startup's trustees agreed to sell off those assets to Jet.com — a buzzy new online wholesale club that some people are already calling a rival to Amazon — for $65,000. According to court documents from December, Jet in turn sold some of those items to ERetail Media, including the domain name and trademarks.

Katie Finnegan, one of the original founders of Hukkster who has since landed at — you guessed it — Jet.com, did not respond to request for comment.

So that's the story of how Hukkster found a second life. Will Hukkster's new functionality catch on with its old customers? That remains to be seen.